Although electronic document creation has become commonplace, the paperless office remains elusive. Many people prefer to review and edit their work on a paper hardcopy. This preference, however, requires that someone transfer all of the handwritten comments into the electronic device. For long documents, the process of scanning each page to find the comments is time consuming and error prone.
This problem is compounded in the modern workplace in which teams of employees frequently prepare and review documents. These group projects frequently require that documents be copied multiple times for distribution, for review and re-review, and to create a record of changes. Unfortunately, this process spreads the editorial comments across the multiple copies of the document. Thus, to find all of the changes and/or to retain a record of who made what changes, someone must sort through multiple copies of the document, then extract those pages with comments, then feed those pages into the copier and/or enter the changes into a computer, then re-insert the pages back into the originals. This process is time consuming and, invariably, results in some lost comments. Another problem intensified by these group projects is that, as documents are serially reviewed, it becomes difficult to identify and focus upon new comments.
One partial solution to these problems, described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,893,908 to Cullen et al., provides automatic archiving of documents and alerts a digital copier when a document to be copied already exists electronically within a database. Drawbacks with this system, however, include that it does not provide for collating of documents with changes, indexing changes as part of copy job, creating side markings as part of a copy job, or comparison of reviewer comments and handwritten additions in the copier job compared to archived documents.
Another partial solution to these problems, described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,832,474, to Lopresti et al., is a document browser for electronic filing systems. The user may write notes on a page with an electronic pen, and later search for those notes using the approximate ink matching (AIM) techniques. This system, however, does not allow reviewers to work with plain paper and with conventional writing instruments, such as a pencil or ballpoint pen. This system also does not provide copy collating, an index to hand written markings as part of the copy output, side markings on the edge of the paper, or provide automatic comparison at copy time of hand written differences in archived documents compared to documents being copied.
Accordingly, there is considerable interest in document and image management systems that can help manage handwritten comments and edits created by reviewers with conventional writing instruments on plain paper.